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Sunday, August 26, 2018

Migrating Legacy Windows Applications with Habitat

Two years ago, Chef launched Habitat as a way to enable application teams to build, deploy, and manage any application in any environment. By packaging applications such that they can be deployed to any runtime, from bare metal servers to containers, Habitat makes it easier than ever to ensure your apps run anywhere your business needs them. One area where Habitat can have a profound effect on your organization's ability to adapt to new technologies is in migrating your legacy applications.

Legacy applications are defined in part by their longevity, which often means that they're tightly coupled to out-of-date operating systems and dependent libraries. This often makes these applications difficult to deploy to modern paradigms, like cloud instances or containers. Historically, organizations have found themselves with two options: rewrite the application, or "lift and shift" the application to a new environment.

Application rewrites can be difficult to scope, and prohibitively expensive and time consuming to implement. By contrast, by packaging a full app environment into an image, lift and shift initiatives are often easier to execute, but don't remove your apps' dependencies on outdated operating systems and libraries. In a recent webinar, Migrating Legacy Windows Applications with Habitat, Chef Principle Software Development Engineer Matt Wrock walks us through a third way — using Habitat to repackage our legacy apps so they can be deployed to any platform or runtime without requiring a rewrite.

If you missed the live webinar, you're in the right place! Check out the recording below to see how Matt demonstrated packing 13-year-old technology for use in modern environments.